Jakob Rømer Barfod

The purpose of this chapter is to conceptualize leadership communication through the lens of a communicative approach to the constitution of organization (henceforth CCO). First, we note that to date relatively few leadership scholars have engaged with CCO. To address this lacuna, we select three current trends in leadership research, notably: the material, the discursive, and the post-heroic. We argue that, to a large extent, these trends are developing in silos and we suggest that taking a CCO approach to leadership can provide fertile ground for developing a synergy between these increasingly important approaches to leadership. Focusing specifically on the Montreal School's ventriloquial approach to CCO, and working from an illustrative analysis, we argue that ventriloquism can provide a lens that not only allows the researcher to consider the distributed network of actants (both human and other-than-human) that "do" leadership as part of everyday mundane communicative practice, but it also adds new insights to our understanding of leadership.